Untitled, 2018

Acrylic, graphite, unwoven canvas, wood
Courtesy of the artist

The work of Ko Kirk Yamahira is monumental in scale, yet obsessionally domestic in execution. The sculptures currently on view at BAM were created by the meticulous craft of unravelling, parting, and disentangling a single sheet of artist’s canvas. The manipulation of canvas is one of the first skills taught an art student, a vital preparation for the life of a painter. Here, where another artist might have simply stretched a canvas in preparation for a painting, Yamahira has deconstructed this ritual of preparation, bending the raw fabric surface of art to his own needs.

This act of simultaneously fabricating an artwork whilst destroying a canvas, is both a mirror and meditation on the creative act itself. While visually, the sculpture could be seen as part of modernist, minimalist tradition, albeit reflected through the lens of craft practice, the reflexive impulse to create while destroying, to find beauty through the veil of decay, to revel in the unravelling, is a metaphor for the search for meaning that can be found in the most simple of mundane tasks.

The Forum at Bellevue Arts Museum is unique in that it affords the visitor an opportunity to view sculpture, art in three dimensions, fully in the round. We encourage the visitor to ascend to our second and third floor galleries via the main staircase and appreciate how this work changes as your own viewpoint modulates in three dimensions.

Ko Kirk Yamahira is an artist living and working in Seattle WA.

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